Win Win (Thomas McCarthy, 2011)

With his gentile, if drably ironic, style and textured, nuanced characters, Thomas McCarthy's Win Win respects and subverts two formulaic, rigid genres: the sports film and the marketably "indie" movie. Set in New Providence, a borough in New Jersey's densely populated Union County, Win Win nevertheless feels isolated and lonely, populated by a scattered collection of reject teenagers both literal and metaphoric who wile away the time in a chilly, winter-barren suburb with nothing but a lot of broken or preemptively denied dreams to stir them. It's the sort of place made for an underdog story, but this is not a film of big victories; though he finds the expressive and emotional value of sports in some people's lives, McCarthy does not suggest that sports holds much relevance in a world beset with political and simple human issues. It is, at best, a salve to alleviate deep wounds that require stronger medicine.

Emphasizing the sense of faded glory and economically dessicated comfort from the start, McCarthy opens the film by tracking forward with Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti), a local attorney, jogging in a park as two younger runners in sleek, form-fitting black barrel past his stocky, yellow-sweatshirted frame. Mike jogs not to stay in shape but because his doctor recommended it to control panic attacks brought on by financial worries. Effectively, he ties nagging terror over his economic straits to his physical deterioration as an out-of-shape, middle-aged man, which seems a recipe for a worse outcome rather than an improvement. Faced with his failing practice collapsing, the otherwise good Mike makes a mercenary decision that soon meets with complications he could not have anticipated and cannot hope to control if some people learn the truth. Amazingly, this ticking time-bomb manages to get tied into high-school wrestling.

Handling the case of Leo (Burt Young), an elderly man suffering from the onset of dementia, Mike initially feels that, as no one can reach his long-estranged daughter, the state will inevitably take over legal guardianship and place the poor man in a nursing home against his will. But when Mike sees how much his guardian receives as a fee every week, he volunteers to watch after Leo, only to dump him in the same home and collect the checks. Instantly, Mike's earlier pithiness about the greedy actions of his colleagues holds no water, as he plunges down a rabbit hole that the inoffensive, nice man surely wouldn't be able to handle under the best of circumstances. But just to speed things up, he returns to Leo's empty house one day to find the man's never-met grandson, Kyle (Alex Shaffer), waiting there alone to see his grandfather.

This has all the trappings of a grim comedy of errors, and at times it indulges that current of simmering irony. Primarily, however, Win Win operates on a more gracefully dramatic level, its comedy arising from the quasi-gallows humor of such dull life. Kyle, with that unwashed clump of bleach-bond dye, expressionless face and mumbled monotone, is funny for the same reason he is pitiable: his social maladjustment gives him a warped innocence that makes him as forthright as a child, but that stunted emotional growth is not merely sad but unsettling. In a town defined by its muted ennui, a place where the only vivid hue is in the mockingly childish yellow of buses and high school color, Kyle stands out as somehow more emotionally retarded than his surroundings, and even Mike's wife, Jackie (Amy Ryan), an amusing hardass who thankfully never lapses into never-pleased bitch territory, cannot help but take the kid in, if for no other reason than delay the time bomb until after it gets sent back home.

McCarthy's previous film, The Visitor, subverted expectations when it made a white man (who was returning to his own property, no less) feel like the foreigner among two immigrants. Instead of heading off to some developing nation to find himself among the poverty and sociopolitical strife of the have-nots, the protagonist immersed himself in culture merely by embracing the mixing customs just outside his door. It was a brilliantly simple way to play both sides of the field without ever feeling like he was covering his bases. Likewise, Win Win does not do anything radical to the setting or the approach, merely skewing matters just enough to make a potentially forced commentary human. Kyle's placement in this maturity-sucking pit creates not so much foils as kindred spirits that illuminate each other. Mike, who coaches the high school wrestling team that was as bad then as it is now under his guidance, clearly uses coaching to hold on to a feeling of youth, but when he discovers that Kyle not only used to wrestle but was nearly state champion, the look of glee and hunger on his face is as plain as the nose on it.

Yet Mike does not live vicariously through Kyle, as we might expect. Instead, he reverts back to his youth to view Kyle as a role model, the boy's physical finesse grounding him even as his own maturity and kindness gives as much shape to Kyle's life as the refreshing return to sport. In the ring, Kyle gets out his pent-up aggression (the slaps he requests from Mike before going out there as troubling as they are hysterically awkward), while at home he proves a considerate, compassionate young man. Shaffer, making his screen debut, could not be better. He brings a fragility to his every move in and out of the ring, but he also has that caged-animal look in his eye and tight frame, every tendon pulled taut ready to explode at any moment. Likewise, Giamatti, playing his usual schlub, is pitch-perfect. Sometimes I joke that Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman must compare casting calls for middle-aged, ever-winded losers, but one can see Giamatti's unique skills on display here. Hoffman's stunted sadsack act carries fits of terrifying rage, the overweight endpoint of Kyle's withdrawn nature in this film. Giamatti's anger, on the other hand, is never more than a pitiful flare-up of impotent misanthropy. He's the sedate American cousin of Johnny from Mike Leigh's Naked, someone whose self-loathing, even at its darkest, never truly breaks past the rotten sphere around him. His slip-ups and outbursts are on a smaller scale that fits the Thorazine-and-Adderall sloth of McCarthy's New Providence.

No less impressive are the character actors McCarthy assembles to add flavor and humanity to the film. Jeffrey Tambor channels the authoritative insecurity of his Hellboy character as Vig, the assistant coach who constantly looks to Mike for approval. Bobby Cannavale's Terry takes the confused maturity levels to new levels of nebulous madness: driven half-mad by his wife's cuckolding, Terry inserts himself into everything with double the insecurity of his friends. Where Mike enjoys basking in Kyle's talents, Terry seems to want Kyle to either beat up the man now living in his home with his wife or to somehow gain Kyle's essence in some kind of reverse-Etoro transfer of life force. But it is Burt Young, the grumbling heavy from such films as Chinatown and the Rocky pictures, who steals the film. He never overplays Leo's dementia, instead giving Leo a tinge of melancholy he can never quite place, his fading mind able to cling to the notion of his desire to return home as he deals with unforeseen stresses. His interactions with the grandson he never met, the grandson he might soon forget, are heartbreaking, the two of them silently bonding and comforting each other for the pain caused by the missing link in this family portrait, the absent daughter who birthed and neglected Kyle.

Her entrance, sadly, throws a cog into the film. Where these amusing, complicated, human portraits interacted and ruminated without dramatic force to bind them to a strict narrative, the mother's emergence forces everything into typical misunderstandings and big moments rather than the subtle growth seen heretofore. Melanie Lynskey is a terrific actress, and she gives this part her all, but she essentially plays a one-note monster of self-absorption who cannot even call out Mike effectively for his twisted scheme involving Leo because she's really just mad he beat her to it. A great deal of the film's grace leaves when she comes into the picture, and it never truly recuperates.

Nevertheless, Win Win stands out for the extreme depth of character and the nonjudgmental, even lilting use of irony. This movie feels like what a Coen brothers film might be if that filmmaking pair made their affections for their oddball characters a bit more plain. McCarthy's direction relies on ambiance and the power of his actors to fill the gulfs in his uncluttered, distraction-less frame, but damned if he doesn't know how to pick 'em. Win Win is perhaps the lesser of his three films to this point, yet it's the one that most interested me for its ability to turn overdone genres on their heads without being radical or confrontational about it. I laughed quite a bit during this movie, but I also felt an overwhelming sense of recognition for these people, for the eroding comfort of those who never branched out and now face economic hardships that ignore their modesty, and for the troubled kid with the chewed wad of Juicy Fruit for hair.

McCarthy's films are all socially relevant, from the millennial drift of The Station Agent to the open, if nuanced post-9/11 commentary of The Visitor, and Win Win clearly shows an America in financial decline, the emotional stagnation of its adults (even Jackie has a Bon Jovi tattoo) perhaps a statement on America's own childish feelings of superiority and worth that held over from the Reagan years, a similar period of self-delusion. McCarthy never hides his views in allegory, but his elegant approach, his focus on character over statement, turns overt commentary into wisps of suggestion that hang over characters instead of defining them. My quibbles with Win Win's last half-hour aside, this is yet more proof of McCarthy's status as one of the most original and remarkable voices in contemporary American cinema.

Community — Season 2

Community's second season improves so dramatically on the first that it's hard to believe the show was already, pound for pound, the funniest series currently on air. While it lacks the depth and ingenuity of Louie, Community achieves such a rapid-fire rate of jokes that it rises over the current crop of excellent television to be one of the finest shows around. Balancing old-school sitcom narrative style (self-contained episodes of ludicrous adventures) with modern TV storytelling (long arcs of both character and narrative), Community often gets away with having its cake and eating it too. It offers episodes so outlandish that the show often breaks even the loosest connection to reality, yet somehow the show manages to consolidate even something as possibility-shattering as a zombie outbreak into the core story of the study group septet of varying ages and backgrounds that resembles more and more the most touching family on-screen as time goes by.

The previous season ended on an emotional cliffhanger not unlike the second season finale of the American version of The Office.  A confession of love, a physical expression of another kind and various subplots resolved and opened new paths to be explored upon the show's return. From the moment Dan Harmon and his crew get back, they not only follow up on these stories but give unexpected spins on plots headed seemingly in the opposite direction. Where the series got off to a slow start with its first few episodes, the second season wastes no time assessing where it stands, where it needs to go and how it can get there in the strangest, most unorthodox way possible.


Given the alternately episodic and overarching progression of the show, discussion of Community necessarily falls to a focus on standout episodes even as that does not give an adequate overview of the show's more long-term strengths. Besides, it's an invitation to folly, as to talk about every episode of quality would force one to spend some time on each individual entry of this fantastic season, for even its isolated moments of weakness have enough jokes and/or development to make them worth several watches.

But let's talk about some of the finer moments for a sec. After two joke-heavy openers that reestablish this world of madcap humor and poke fun at the existing character relations, "The Psychology of Letting Go" moves away from filling in contextualizing blanks in the characters' stories to truly moving them forward. The death of Pierce's (Chevy Chase) mother prompts change, ironically, in several characters except Pierce, whose piety to a silly cult becomes deeply felt as a coping mechanism as the cynicism of some others sparks internal debates between showing Pierce the painful truth and respecting his means of self-comfort. Capturing the show's ability to turn between emotion and goofiness on a dime is an eerie yet sweet deathbed message recorded by Pierce's mom that ends with a punchline out of left field that turns a choked sob into a barked laugh, and Pierce's own reaction stands perfectly between sadness and comic oblivion.

That small-scale approach is then contrasted with wild genre parodies like "Basic Rocket Science" and "Epidemiology." The former uses a claustrophobic simulator to act out a parody of Apollo 13, while the latter features the aforementioned zombie outbreak at Halloween. In both cases, the writers find clever ways to justify such ridiculous subject matter, not merely as something that could conceivably happen in real life but something that comes about as the direct result of the cheap budget workarounds a failing community college could provide. Ergo, the simulator used in "Basic Rocket Science" is nothing more than an exhibition toy for kids that survived the '80s, inexplicably and hilariously sponsored and programmed by KFC. Such episodes continue the proud tradition of last season's "Modern Warfare" and "Contemporary American Poultry," broad homages that stylistically embody the sort of references that are spoken aloud throughout the series.

No less enticing, however, are the handful of episodes that manage to act out such parodies without going through budget-breaking grandstanding. With the Halloween episode and a two-part return to paintball madness for a finale, Community surely used up a great deal of its allotted money in a few goes, and it finds creative avenues for dealing with other types of film. This often has the added benefit of shifting the focus to character growth to fill the gaps left by bigger stunts. Take "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons," an episode that uses a game of D&D to mock fantasy film but remains firmly within the library study room at all times without anything save good framing and camera movement to give the scenes any kinetic properties. Yet the episode proves not only to bring out some endearing humanity in these sarcastic characters but to develop a side character heretofore used only as a cruel punchline, and the character even enjoys a more prominent (if still tertiary) presence in the remainder of episodes. Likewise, one episode promises to be a full-on parody of Pulp Fiction before it derails almost immediately into a heartfelt dinner conversation between Jeff and Abed slowly revealed to be a parody not of Tarantino but the sort of movie one would never expect to be referenced in a freewheeling pop-culture explosion like Community.

Through it all, we see incremental growth in these people even as they deal with the same struggles that hounded them from the start. Joel McHale continues to sharpen Jeff's prickly warmth by pitting his sarcastic remove against the begrudging realization that the other six are really the only people he has in the world. The writers put Shirley's poison-tinged honey to the test with an unexpected pregnancy that pokes holes in her religious self-righteousness without mockingly pointing out hypocrisy; in the process, we learn more about her as well as the ex-husband whose mythic evil erodes in the face of reality. This nonjudgmental view of Shirley's unwitting contradictions is echoed in her secular foil Britta (Gillian Jacobs), whose feminist and liberal indignation increasingly seem a front for more conservative and harsh views that engender guilt in her. These deeper examinations demonstrate a logical progression, never reinventing characters and using even storytelling clichés like pregnancy to bring about gradual, contextual change.

As such, it's no wonder that the season's brightest light (among stiff competition) is "Cooperative Calligraphy." Though no less self-aware and parodic than the bigger episodes, this self-declared bottle episode uses its constricted setting and commentary on typical television tricks to clarify the shifting dynamics within the group and how those alterations both skew and reaffirm how these characters relate to each other. It even does so by undermining the show's usual tricks for getting out of a hairy emotional situation, knowingly sidestepping what was already feeling stale even as it inserts many of its usual elements such as a Jeff Winger speech, which is inspiring but dovetails off into exasperation and madness to leave the full payoff for later.

I admit I wasn't entirely on-board with everything this season. Pierce's descent into villainy is cartoonish without the tangible emotional payoff that tempers the show's other flights of fancy, and a humanizing touch inserted in the finale seems too small a gesture to combat the vicious unpleasantness Chase (with admitted skill and timing) plumbed in the latter half of the season. Furthermore, a few episodes hedge too closely to preceding half-hours, from an election episode that feels too much like lazy political commentary slapped onto the much-better "Debate 109." Having said that, the two-part finale mines the same basic setup as "Modern Warfare" yet finds a new stylistic inspiration (swapping out action movies for spaghetti Westerns and Star Wars) that makes it no less entertaining.

If Louie uses its episodes to deconstruct life and interpersonal comedy, Community takes the shallower approach of dismantling the funhouse mirror of televisual exaggeration. Nevertheless, its consistency in episode quality and character development make it no less than the third best show on TV after Louie and Breaking Bad. Whether hanging out with Troy and Abed or learning more about the hefty cast of background characters (many of whom openly resent how our leads hog all the attention), Community takes continues to turn what might be detached, self-satisfied hodgepodge of pop culture references into something resolutely sweet, perhaps the best and funniest "hugging and learning" sitcom since The Cosby Show's best days. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to watch a compilation of Donald Glover crying.

Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011)

For about 45-50 minutes, Contagion had me ready to run home, duct-tape the seals of my house and never come into contact with a human being again. Steven Soderbergh's detached, "so this is how the world ends" direction and and crisp, clinical cinematography effectively built fear through a steady profession of paranoia escalating from backdoor, classified whispers over vague data to full-on societal panic. Soderbergh's classical style makes even his transcontinental montage intelligible, and his experiments with asynchronous sound and image separates the aesthetic from the action even more, giving it a paradoxically compelling flatness that reminded me of the purportedly meek delivery Jonathan Edwards gave to the fiery words of his "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," a mild intellectual remove that only makes the impact that much more powerful.

Then, cracks started to form. Contagion boasts the largest, most geographically disconnected cast of any of his films since Traffic, a film that shares more than a few stylistic and structural traits with Contagion and even seems the thematic inverse of this movie. But like Traffic, Contagion spreads itself too thin, across too many people and too many locations without being reliant upon any of them. The emotional distance of such incessant cross-cutting gives way to a belated, almost arbitrary stab at sentimentality that burdens Soderbergh's film with calculated schmaltz that clashes garishly with the studious, medical examiner feel of the rest of the movie. Funnily enough, this is the rare film that actually suffers for its attempts at humanity.


Much more gripping is the methodical progression of the disease from the first seconds. Soderbergh does not even get past the opening black screen before the film without inserting the ragged cough of Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow). When the image starts, we see Paltrow looking like hell, a decidedly unglamorous view of an A-lister that kicks off the eerie feel of the impersonality of a disease spread. Anyone susceptible, regardless of notoriety, can get sick, and this new strain works with horrific speed. In only a few minutes of screen time, not only is Beth dead but her young son, leaving her apparently immune husband, Mitch (Matt Damon), bewildered, quarantined for testing and inconsequential to the rapid spread of the virus as it hops continents in the span of hours.

Paltrow and Damon are merely the tip of the iceberg for Contagion's loaded all-star cast. Marion Cotillard, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Bryan Cranston, Elliott Gould, John Hawkes and more fill the screen in various roles as members of the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control monitor the outbreak and head out into the field to study and contain the outbreaks. Where did Soderbergh hold auditions, Spago? That so many would line up for a film that is truly about an invisible presence, making them secondary forces and pawns for the true "protagonist," is a testament to Soderbergh's drawing power, and for a time he keeps us guessing as to who will survive.

Soderbergh gave the Red digital camera a major demonstration in the form of his two-part Che, and he further demonstrates its range and clarity here. Che was a film of natural colors used to thematic effect, the bright sunlight of The Argentine and the overcast, muted tones of Guerrilla communicating the shifting dynamic of the separate revolutionary campaigns. Here, Soderbergh crafts a half-sick, half-sterile aesthetic of grimy artificial light captured in unflattering realism, clarifying every pore, every clammy hand and spittle flecked mouth until the extreme close-ups of human contact and pulled back shots of the isolation of the survivors ensures we feel equally uncomfortable in crowded areas of potential hosts and alone as society crumbles. Woozy camera movement and quick cuts to hands grasping bus poles or passing around food make the implications even more nauseating, while the icy blue pall that hangs over funereal shots of mass graves and tattered masses lining up for anything even suspected of being a cure emphasizes the distancing horror of death on an epic scale.

Also worth a mention is the electronic score from longtime Soderbergh collaborator Cliff Martinez. Not as dynamic as some recent electronic scores (say, the ones for The Social Network and Hanna), Martinez's soundtrack nevertheless proves a driving element of the film, particularly given the lack of true character propulsion. If repetitive, the score works well for finding the perfect aural balance of scuzzy, frantic buzz and quarantined sterility that fits both the clinical official response and growing sickness and collapse on the streets. The sound mix of many of Soderbergh's connecting montages rely almost exclusively on Martinez's cold burbles and hums, and they keep the movie going well after the visual juxtapositions start to grow thin.

But grow thin they do, and eventually the film tries to eke emotional responses out of characters heretofore represented as only as impersonal reactors to the spread of the disease. A subplot involving Jude Law as a firebrand blogger whose anti-Establishment crowing perhaps hides a keen willingness to exploit capitalism to the fullest seeks to show the profiteering and misinformation that befall and propel mass panics. However, as everyone in the cast is so cut off from one another that Law's effects are felt only in the background and the extent to which he makes things worse is never made clear. We're also made to care about Fishburne as the CDC director who makes an all-too-human mistake at a time when complete classification is necessary to keep the peace. Worst of all is Mitch's plotline, which not only saddles the poor man with the deaths of his wife and stepchild but deals with infidelity and adds the useless subplot of his surviving daughter, who regards the 21st century equivalent of the Black Death as, like, a total drag.

My wavering support nearly collapsed in the final half-hour, at which point plotlines began to sag and cease without any pretense at resolution, late-stage sentimental dross like Mitch's daughter pining for her boyfriend suddenly blossomed and a montage coda clarified that which did not truly require clarification. Furthermore, the initial vulnerability of the A-listers eventually gives way to a pat immortality that ensures as many famous people as possible stay on til the end. I still enjoyed Contagion; watching Soderbergh do his thing was more entertaining than most of this summer's offerings, and occasionally he found ways to ground his epic scope into something gripping. The end, however, turns a chilly take on a grimy genre film into a wannabe prestige picture with what I could swear was an environmentalist message the one time such a message just does not apply. In fairness, I can't think of any way that Contagion might have ended in wholly satisfactory fashion, but the perfunctory optimism of Hollywood undermines a daring, unsettling and initially unsparing view of humanity's mass reduction. In retrospect, the awkward late-film shift in tone is less surprising than anyone allowing the first hour and 20 minutes.

The Green Zone: Scanning - Teaching Reading

Of course Scanning is not a grammar point, but it is a technique we teach students to read better. Since many readings are sources for grammar points, I used this segment to have students practice scanning for information in a written text.



Scanning is a technique to search for key words or ideas. In most cases, you know what you're looking for, so you're concentrating on finding a particular answer. Scanning involves moving your eyes quickly down the page seeking specific words and phrases. When scanning, look for the author's use of organizers such as numbers, letters, steps, or the words, first, second, or next. Look for words that are bold faced, italics, or in a different font size, style, or color.

I. You will watch a scene of an invetigator scanning for information. He googles Lawn Dayne / Wall Street Journal / WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction). Scan the information along with the main character in the movie and write down all key words and data you can see.

II. Watch the segment again and complete your data collection.

II. Work with a partner and come up with an article summarizing the information you put together. You may use your imagination to come up with an interesting article. Don't forget to add a title to your article.







WORKSHEET

MOVIE SEGMENT DOWNLOAD - THE GREEN ZONE

55 Days at Peking (Nicholas Ray, 1963)

[The following is a contribution to the Nicholas Ray Blog-A-Thon for Tony Dayoub's Cinema Viewfinder.]

The last true feature Nicholas Ray made before his death, the Boxer Rebellion epic 55 Days at Peking perhaps doesn't even count on those terms as he collapsed before its completion. But while We Can't Go Home Again shall perhaps forever be an incomplete assembly of experimental sight and sound and Lightning Over Water is more Wim Wenders' baby, 55 Days at Peking must stand as the last movie to at least look like a Nick Ray movie, though I'm afraid it doesn't ever do much more than that. Often, this is the precise opposite of a problem, Ray's mad style elevating even the most stiff of projects into the realms of pure, glorious spectacle. Here, however, it at last feels like window-dressing, a spring of parsley on a burnt roast made by too many cooks.

But if the film is one of Ray's rare failures, it is nevertheless a necessary viewing, if for no other reason than the grim spectacle of seeing a master fall apart behind the camera. Even then, there are sumptuous visual delights to be had in this over-sprawling clash of West and East. Its clever opening shots, floating over the various embassies of foreign powers as their anthems merge with harmony and disharmony just outside the Forbidden City. As one cynical Chinese man says to a friend, "Different nations say the same thing at the same time: 'We want China.'" The resentment of foreign encroachment (and equal incredulity on the part of the Westerners at the resistance they face at disseminating their values) gives the film a common thread with all late-career Ray features. Sadly, it soon loses focuses and improperly handles the potential incisiveness of the commentary.

Intriguingly, 55 Days at Peking always seems to set every scene in a classical piece of Western staging before pulling back to show the Chinese culture around it. Whether it's the Western look of dusty, Union blue Marines riding in front of the Forbidden City or a martial arts demonstration that becomes the centerpiece of a European-style ball, this constant intrusion of one culture into another contextualizes the film's focus on the outsiders trying to spread their customs to a hostile people. Despite the shown atrocities of the Boxers, Ray likewise does not soft-sell the oblivious paternalism of the free (if you're a Western, white power) trade invasion that threatens China's autonomy through means other than war: economics.

Had the film shaved a good half-hour off its bloated running time and went for meaty themes over epic sprawl, such unorthodox ideas and subject matter might have made this as much a late triumph as The Savage Innocents. But 55 Days at Peking takes too long to get to its subject matter, its inventive juxtapositions of blind Western comfort and boiling Boxer tensions get bogged down in lengthy scenes that put off the true narrative for nearly an hour and derail the action not long after it belatedly begins.

Worse, the film soon gives way to a far more simplistic, reactionary reading as a piece of anti-Chinese Cold War propaganda. China's quest for sovereignty becomes not a reasonable cause against the arrogant cultural intrusion of the US, Great Britain, Russia, Spain, France and the like but a wave of terrorism that depicts Chinese insurrectionists as amoral monsters. They kill missionaries, they kill dignitaries. And lest anyone point out that missionaries and diplomats were hardly blameless in China's slow financial annexation, Boxers even shoot a white child on screen, ensuring our hatred.

I don't know what ideas are Ray's and what are those of producer Samuel Bronston, replacement director Andrew Marton or the team of writers assembled. Judging from Ray's past films, the more even-handed criticism that peeks through at times seems his work: we can see why the Chinese would obviously be upset by the growing influence of other nations, and there's no small amount of irony in an early scene of U.S. Marine Maj. Matt Lewis (Charlton Heston) trying to smooth things over with the local Boxers by bribing them to let a man go, even after he learns the man is dead. The American wants to buy trust, because he is an American and assumes money will win over the Boxers who want their own money back. Likewise, while the final commentary that the dynasty that tacitly endorsed the Boxers to drive out foreign parties effectively signed its death warrant (a clear precursor to Maoist revolt), it also makes for a complex view of how a revolt can spiral into a mob that hurts as much as it helps, as well as adding a dark tinge to the otherwise encouraged victory and assertion of dominance of the white powers.

But these are fitful moments of depth in a plodding, occasionally vile movie that presents the Western powers in an Alamo-like situation of whites defending themselves against the Other, even though the whites happen to be in the Other's territory. The film adheres to so many easy tacks—punishing the woman (Ava Gardner) for sleeping with a Chinese general, celebrating the Eight-Nation Alliance as a show of pan-imperial unity as opposed to a protection of investments—that one wonders if Ray collapsed as much from self-disgust at what he'd been forced into as his crippling addictions. Ray, who elevated the stately Biblical epic King of Kings by paradoxically shrinking its scope to more human levels, here feels trapped by convention, and not even Marton, who worked on another elevated Biblical epic (he was an assistant director on Ben-Hur) can add any life to this material.

Heston and David Niven, playing male rivals common to Ray's work, are both excellent, from Heston's Searchers-lite journey involving the half-Chinese daughter of a captain to Niven's self-doubt over whether he subconsciously allowed this rebellion to happen to boost his social profile and get a promotion. Some action scenes are likewise big and impressive, yet in nearly all cases they trade energy for vacant spectacle, making static even the sight of massive explosions. But it's just not enough. While thankfully not Ray's true swan song, 55 Days at Peking is nevertheless an unfortunate, if not entirely disposable, view of a compromised, splintered artist finally exhausting his last fumes.

The Janitor (Nicholas Ray, 1974)

[The following is a contribution to the Nicholas Ray Blog-A-Thon for Tony Dayoub's Cinema Viewfinder.]

Nicholas Ray's contribution to the Wet Dreams anthology film, entitled "The Janitor," is a deconstruction of Nicholas Ray the symbol through the symbolic destruction of Nicholas Ray the man. Ray himself plays two of the film's three chief parts, those of a priest speaking to a teenage congregation and a janitor who toils in a movie studio that becomes increasingly connected to the priest's story through broken diegesis and metacinema. And through it all, the film adheres to the softcore theme behind the overall project.

The first striking aspect of the film is Ray's face. With his untamed hair, eye patch, lined face and perilous, craggy chasm of a mouth, Ray looks like Dionysus in decline, a hard-living hero now dessicated by self-abuse. That brand of self-abuse finds its way into the film's main form of self-abuse, and the swirling torrent of religiosity, sexual ecstasy, guilt and self-hatred that springs forth from this collision makes "The Janitor" an unexpected triumph. Unless you were watching this to get off, in which case the film is a horrendous failure.

The contrast between the janitor and priest suggests that one is the fever dream vision of the other. As the janitor dances playfully around the studio as he sweeps, the faraway priest has his young daughter pull up his stockings before he goes out to address his teenage following. There, he rants against Moses' commandment "Thou shalt not commit adultery," his screed flowing in and out of coherence as occasional returns to the janitor show the man happily toiling away, lost in his own head.

Back with the congregation, the priest's words have such an overpowering effect that the teenagers begin to engage in an orgy, much to his consternation. "Stop!" he begs. "I still have plenty of things to tell you!" If the film's ragged assembly suggests a fight with his own cinematic proclivities, the sight of a visibly bemused Ray trying to calm his eroticized disciples works as a skewed look at his second career as a teacher, perhaps exposing his fears that he had not imparted what he wished onto his pupils.

The aesthetic experiments go even deeper. Post-sync sound turns the audio mix into a hodgepode of the skittering recorded sounds of clattering objects and hiss and the overdubbed speech of a French baritone with a voice so deep and ponderous that the separately recorded speech divorces from the diegetic world until it becomes dialogue and omniscience to bridge the two distinct scenarios. In effect, both the audio and visuals embody a duality in their construction, distinct halves not so much in opposition as all-out war, thrown at each other like atoms in a collider until they smash together and fuse. Ray long used this approach with character, most notably in the rival soldiers of Bitter Victory and the conservationist/poacher duo in Wind Across the Everglades; here, however, he uses the make-up of film itself.

By the end of the segment's 14 nigh-impenetrable minutes, Ray has covered such topics as religious guilt, the spirituality of the orgasm (and the sexual bliss of the spirit), incest and the structural elements of cinema. The daydream at last becomes a movie, and an enraged janitor pulls a rifle from a closet and fires into his own looming image, an act of meta-suicide that seems the oddly logical endpoint of Ray's corpus of self-annihilating icon erection and deconstruction. Though Ray would continue to tweak the previous year's experiment We Can't Go Home Again and make the part-doc Lightning Over Water with Wim Wenders, "The Janitor" is an unexpected yet curiously satisfying summary of one of the cinema's greatest voices.

King of Kings (Nicholas Ray, 1961)

[The following is a contribution to the Nicholas Ray Blog-A-Thon for Tony Dayoub's Cinema Viewfinder.]

Though it begins with the overture and audiovisual bombast expected of a 70mm Biblical epic, King of Kings soon turns into a movie that establishes emotional resonance even as it continues to deliver vast-scale shots of grandeur. Beginning more than 50 years before Christ's birth, Nicholas Ray's film thus dedicates its first images to the sights of Romans sacking Jerusalem, enslaving, pillaging and murdering Jews to establish supremacy. This curbs the sense of wonder, to say the least. Yet this focus on the historical context of the Gospel finds a secular approach to the religious story. The Jews in this film do not pine for a savior because of age-old prophecies; they simply need someone to help them escape this misery.

This situates the film somewhere between Ben-Hur and The Last Temptation of Christ. Though not as humanizing as Martin Scorsese's controversial film, Ray's epic nevertheless breaks ground of its own, breaking from the tradition of showing Jesus in synecdochical ellipses to show Christ in full. The mere process of visualizing him humanizes him, focusing on the man instead of the symbol. Ray understands this, even going so far as to frame most of Jesus' miracles in shadow or other indirect visuals to firmly separate the man from the god. Ray does not visually segment these sides of Jesus for the purposes of commentary or irony, merely to keep our focus on the man even if, like all Ray heroes, becomes an idol before our eyes.

Working for an independent production company (though the film was later distributed by MGM), Ray had to make do with a modest budget of $6,000,000, a small sum even then, especially for a 70mm extravaganza. The limitations are evident: a number of miracles are not shown but described by a soldier reporting to Pontius Pilate. Ray clearly called in some favors to make sure he could complete the project, and the cast brims with former collaborators. Most intriguing is Jeffrey Hunter as Jesus, considering his previous work for Ray was as Jesse James. There, his icy stare and impenetrability made him stilted. Here, despite the literally ancient nature of his dialogue, Hunter's blue eyes convey only kindness and compassion. Christ's Golden Rule was "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," but as one looks into Hunter's "teenage heartthrob" face (he was 33 at the time), one senses that maybe that was just because Jesus wanted someone to reciprocate his complete love and gentleness for mankind.

Hunter's emergence after Jesus' childhood and a diversion to show the Jewish rebels fighting back against Herod and Pilate—another bit of historical rationalization that unfortunately carries on too long despite the thrill of the insurrection scenes—elevates the film from its beautiful but static presentation to one that subsumes its grandeur into the humanity of its godly protagonist. This can be seen first when Jesus heads into the desert to confront Satan's temptations. First, Ray frames Jesus' time in the desert as clear torment, and the devil's temptations are thus made more tangibly enticing for offering relief to Jesus. When he passes these tests, though, a faint smile passes his face, one not of braggadocio but relief. This is not the smile of an infallible god but a man who has resisted the sway of sin and won, a man who had genuine stakes in his test and passed from effort, not a foregone conclusion.

Indeed, so much of this film feels unexpected for its subversion of iconography and mythology for more personal angles and even modicums of historical accuracy, finding fresh inroads for the endlessly repeated Gospel tales. The Sermon on the Mount becomes less a lecture than a Socratic dialogue between Jesus and the skeptics and faithful, a condensation of other of Jesus' teachings into an exchange of ideas no less edifying than outright instruction. We meet Judas (a young, unrecognizable Rip Torn) as a rebel under Barabbas (an overracting Harry Guardino, all gritted teeth hisses and animal-skin garb); his eventual betrayal of Jesus is the result not of base greed but conviction that the threat of Roman punishment will bring out the full power of the man he believes is the Son of God, leading to the Jews' deliverance. When the crowds later call for Barabbas' freedom instead of Christ's, we finally get a sense of why the Jews would want him freed over Jesus. He's the one who directly fights the Roman oppressors, while Christ continues only to speak of better days in the next world.

No longer framing through the compression of CinemaScope, Ray nevertheless finds a way to practice his architectural perfectionism in Super-70. Though many shots of the film carry the impersonal vastness of the Biblical epic, Ray inserts numerous moments that betray his hand. King of Kings boasts inventive angles, frames within the frame, and a use of shadow that, ironically, convey the warmth of God incarnate rather than encroaching menace. Red soaks the palace of Herod, as if the blood spilled of all the men, women and children cut down by his command caked his home. Best of all is a moving shot of a chained John the Baptist scaling a prison wall just to touch Jesus' outstretched hand, a shot that gains even more emotional resonance from the framing of Christ's shadow beside John as he looks up, effectively signaling that Jesus is already with him even as he reaches for the Lord.

Also a delight is Miklos Rozsa's rousing score, a justly famous swell of brass that now exists far outside the film itself as one of the great classic soundtracks. I'd never seen this film before, yet I recognized the main brass theme instantly, never knowing it came from this movie. Rozsa also did the score for Ben-Hur, but I may well prefer his work here. Rozsa also judges the moments of more intimate humanity, adding nuance and texture to the gargantuan roar of his Hosanna trumpets. By the end of the film, even that fist-raising theme has been on a journey of its own, wracked through the pain of Christ's sacrifice and reemerging with renewed vigor with the resurrection.

Much better than expected, the unfairly neglected King of Kings nevertheless fumbles occasionally for its overlength, ironically because Ray does such a good job of humanizing Christ that he makes many huge moments somewhat distracting and disjointed. He spends too much time on the Passion, yet he impressively avoids lingering on images of torture, eliding over graphic images to come at the torture and crucifixion from different angles. If it overstays its welcome, King of Kings nonetheless does succeed as a unique portrait of Christ in a saturated pool of depictions. I admit a bias for any film that approaches Christ as a man first and a god second, but Hunter, who failed to impress me as Jesse James, found the soft contours of his stiff, undying youth, and Ray tempered the anti-auterist format of the Biblical epic with his invigorating compositions. As I did with Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, I found myself willing to follow this Jesus, not because I believed he was the Son of God but because he was a good person, tested and struggling like the rest of us. It's more impressive if a man can overcome such obstacles anyway. Though Ray still has to cater to the full Christian significance of the story, his humanizing touches make this one of my favorite depictions of Jesus in cinema.

*This omission, I feel, was the most disappointing result of the limited budget. By having to talk of the call for the violent Barrabas' freedom, Ray must deny himself some more mob commentary, for what is the rabble calling for Christ's crucifixion but the original and most notorious mob? Then again, it does spare this telling of the Gospel its most antisemitic aspect, which is not without worth.